I’ve been running windows 8 for a few months now, but today suddenly the windows search indexer – windowsindexer.exe – suddenly started hogging CPU and driving my laptop nuts. I didn’t make any system changes recently, so why the heck would this just suddenly start? I found a few others online who seem to have the same issue, and didn’t find a defninitve answer to the problem… so I’ve just disabled the indexer for now until I can find some better advice. Add a comment below if you’ve run into this, and/or if you’ve found any actual causes for this problem.
Tag: performance
64bit Oracle Instant Client Performance
I’ve made a post on StackOverflow – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6718890/oracle-datareader-in-net-way-too-slow-over-network/6747497#6747497 about a weird performance issue Ive encountered with the 64 bit version of the Oracle Instant Client 11g. I’ve tested on other machines with a 32 bit client (though not instant) and it is much faster, around 10 times the speed, when using a simple datareader to fetch table records. The details are in that post, but I’ll just say that the performance was bad enough with this client that I had to seek an alternative to use for my project… and it wasn’t very pretty.
I’d be really curious to hear an explanation for this- plain ol bug, or is the supersized 64 bits causing the client to do extra work and killing the performance? Or is it just the instance client is always like this? The one thing I havent tried yet is using the 32 bit version of the instant client on the same machine and see if it improves things. I have a feeling it will…
WPF Printing Performance and PDF
Printing in WPF has been a big thorn for me over the last few years, it just feels like you have to learn everything the hard way through extensive trial and error… and better write it down or you’ll be re-learning it again later.
One hard lesson for me has been printing a lot of vector based graphics in a particular application. Early on the data would wind up rasterizing for various reasons and creating massive rasterized data pages, which when sent to the printer would cloe things way down and create ugly printouts (someone has a case of the jaggies). Even PDF printing suffered from this, so instead of a nice lightweight PDF with some lines and text drawn on the page, it would barf out a giant file with every page represented in ugly rasterized pixels.
The first thing to make sure of if you fighting this is to make sure any element you are printing doesnt use any form of transparency (opacity). I had an element sneak back into my app recently which had text printed with a background color with opacity set to 35%. Not sure if this is the fault of WPF, PDF, or the particular Acrobat software I’m using, but even a single element with this opacity setting on a page will cause the entire page to be rasterized… not just the element itself, as one might expect.
The other side effect of this rasterization is slow printing. Even printing to a local PDF file can take over a minute PER PAGE on my high-end laptop. So if your print times seem astronomical, you’re likely running into this same issue.
I recall a number of other weird issues encountered in the past, I’ll copy them here if I can find them again. But for now, note to self: NO opacity variations.
Update:
I found out today another item that can cause rasterization – if you have a canvas with clipping turned on, and items hanging out beyond the edge of the canvas. Doesnt seem to always do it though, it might only occur if the items clipped by the canvas extend beyond the edge of the printed page. I experienced this again today and now I’ll have to figure out yet another workaround for it.
FireFox 4 is Slow
I don’t use firefox all that much but I do use it when i need to use one of the many plugins avaialble for it (my biggest beef with ie- make it pluggable already).
Popped it up the other day and what’s this, version 4 is out. Sounds great, let’s upgrade.
I have a really powerful laptop, and it is just amazing to me how incredibly slow firefox has become. Opening a new instance takes.. I don’t know, I usually forget I was opening it and go on to something else, only to be surprised when it suddenly appears.
What happened to the small nimble browswer that was kicking ms’s bootay years ago?
Can we go back to FF 1 or 2?